Mergers and acquisitions can unlock exciting opportunities for growth, but they can also create Mergers and acquisitions can unlock exciting growth, but bringing two businesses together is rarely as simple as it looks on paper.
In this practical, on-demand session, Kascade’s Barry Coombs and Oli Restorick explain how strong preparation makes the operational side of a deal smoother, and share the six-step framework they use to merge professional services firms onto a single Microsoft 365 environment.
If your firm is acquiring, being acquired, mid-integration, or simply preparing for future growth, this webinar gives you the practical questions to ask before, during and after a deal.
What will you learn?
- Why preparation before a deal matters more than most organisations realise
- How to understand what you’re inheriting and identify risks early
- Which systems, processes and data are critical to the business
- What needs to happen immediately after a deal versus longer-term consolidation
- Common mistakes that lead to fragmented operations and inefficiency
- Security, compliance and risk considerations when bringing firms together
- How modern firms simplify integration and collaboration across teams
- A practical checklist of questions to ask before, during and after a deal
FAQs
Integrations struggle when firms end up with multiple Active Directories, separate Microsoft 365 tenants, and duplicate applications that each hold their own data. Add disparate processes and accreditations, poor visibility, and IT being brought in late, and the result is inconsistent standards, security risk, and frustrated employees. Strong discovery and planning before the deal prevents most of these problems.
No. Two firms can run on the same Microsoft 365 stack yet use completely different third-party applications, security features and ways of working. Features such as sensitivity labels, encryption and Intune can actually make migrations harder, and certain workloads — like one-to-one Teams chat — are technically difficult to migrate. Similar platforms do not mean simple integration.
It’s the process of moving users, email, files and data from one Microsoft 365 tenant into another so both firms work in a single environment. Typically the smaller firm’s data moves into the larger (acquiring) firm’s tenant. Part of the due diligence is deciding which tenant is the source and which is the target, and understanding where data fidelity — such as original creation and modified dates — may be affected.
Often, yes. Teams chat is usually worth migrating because people have been communicating there for a reason, though some firms — particularly in legal — deliberately make chat non-persistent so sensitive discussion stays in the matter or email. What can be migrated depends on the chat type and the migration tooling.
For firms that want people to genuinely collaborate, a single tenant is the gold standard — the experience is always better than B2B. B2B collaboration is a useful bridge to keep third-party apps and identities working until everyone can be brought together. Keeping firms in separate tenants makes more sense when an investor is buying businesses to build and sell on rather than operate as one.
As early as possible. A common and costly mistake is keeping deals confidential until they’re signed, then handing IT a tight go-live with little visibility. Involving IT early allows proper discovery, a realistic plan, and a smoother experience for users.